Well, at the beginning of this trip I talked about the gods laughing at the best laid plans of mice and men. This has come to haunt me. We left our caravan park at 8:30 this morning. Plan was to be at Miles by 1:30 pm; some 520km further. Haha, we were 40km further, going through Rockhampton when a Tradie pulled up next to us at an intersection and informed us that one of the caravan tires was flat.
Inconvenient, bothersome and unhappy were some of the thoughts we had. I pulled off the road and changed the tire. Drove to a tire place and was informed that the tire had started separating, inner layer from outside casing. So a new tire was needed. Ok, $100 later I had another new tire. I also lost more than an hour on the trip.
Would you believe it, 10 km from our destination Dawn heard a bang and just saw smoke when she looked out the window. The spare tire that we used to replace the bad one with, had also exploded and was smoking as I drove. Pulled off the road again and put the new tire on. Just as well we had it fixed. So to-morrow morning early I will have to buy a new tire before we continue our trip. Another $100. I can hear the gods laughing as I write this.
There is an interesting tree at the caravan park. I have seen a few of these along the way in Queensland. To me the trunk looks like the boab tree like one sees in the Kimberleys WA. However, the foliage looks very different. I have searched on the internet to find out that this tree is called the Queensland Bottle Tree. See pic attached. It really is a beautiful tree
The Qld bush along the way sports many trees > I was expecting the countryside to be very much drier and sparser. I have pics of some great vistas. The countryside here in NSW is just splendid. It is green and stunning where it was very dry when we went through here 10 weeks ago.
The road along the Newell Highway is very busy (as expected). There are hundreds of big rigs heading up and down. They varied in size up to the road trains that were up to 4 trailers long. The Newell is a major arterial way that connects the big centers of south eastern Australia. Some other big haulers had massive loads that took up the whole width of the bitumen. They were preceded by police patrols that forced all else off the road. See pic.
